I Know You Can Do Better

Check out this sweet phone.

When reading a blog post about the difference in button layout across nearly every Android handset I was intrigued to read about the latest version of the “pure Google” Nexus phone. I watched front page video at the official Nexus website (which doesn’t display right in Safari, but why should it?) and the first thing I noticed was that it’s made up almost entirely of staring at people’s feet as they walk around a vaguely Gondryesque transforming set. If you’ve got an awesome product why would you not focus on that?
Worst of all once the phone was actually in front of the screen for more than half a second I noticed that all of the usage is fake overlaid screens. It’s not that there’s necessarily something wrong with overlaying the screen image on the video, but people will notice when you do it and the first thing they’ll think is “well that obviously means it doesn’t work like it does in the commercial.”

It doesn’t.

One of the things Apple got right with the iPhone was that nearly alloftheadvertisements for the first couple of years were just video of actual usage of the phone, no simulated imagery to be seen. When people went into an Apple store to try out the iPhone for the first time, it worked exactly like it does in the commercial, they could even recreate the commercial themselves if they wanted to.